


"Dagon", but told from a different perspective

by Anonymous



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft
Genre: "deity" here is ambiguous, Attempt at Humor, Dagon is TIRED (TM), Earthquakes, Gen, Inaccurate Lovecraft Lore, Not Beta Read, Out of Character, POV Third Person, Retelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:47:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27811783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Title explains enough about the plot. This was just a writing exercise that I think turned out decent enough, so I'm sharing it here.
Kudos: 3
Collections: Anonymous





	"Dagon", but told from a different perspective

**Author's Note:**

> i'm sorry but the entire time i read the short story i couldn't help but think about how surreal it must've been to see this random human pop up in a place he honestly shouldn't have been able to reach lmao 
> 
> also there's some headcanons i wove into here, specifically that the "nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window after a shocking cry," (a line from The Call of Cthulhu) is the narrator of "Dagon", which explains why this story takes place during 1925 instead of whenever-the-hell it was intended to take place.
> 
> one more note: i'm pretty new to this genre and i haven't read all of lovecraft—or lovecraft-inspired works that have made it into widely-accepted lore—which means that there are probably tons of details i got wrong! sorry about that lol

Time was anything but monotonous. It had never been, considering the nature of this particular universe’s formation. Few were aware of its true maddening, perhaps depressing, nature. Most were blissful and ignorant, and some of those who learned the truth might come to admitting jealousy towards those who knew only normalcy.

Dagon was  _ aware _ .

He would never be jealous of those who weren’t, because he was quite sure he was the sort of thing they expressed great grief to learn about. He didn’t consider himself that ghastly a sight, but this most recent event definitely hammered that fact into his mind.

It started, and ended, with a storm and an earthquake. 

In the early spring of 1925—by human standards, at least—an abrupt earthquake had shook the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Dagon was minding his own goddamn business, as any self-respecting underwater deity should, unlike some meddlesome Great Old Ones he found too irritating to name. The storm that rose miles and miles above was abnormal in origin, prophesying the arrival of a great change in Earth’s history, something that had been foretold for millions of years. Rain hit the ocean’s turbulent waves, feeding into an already gorged body of water, and that was the moment that the seabed shifted. 

Dagon was used to earthquakes. They happened all the time. This planet was a restless sleeper, and its layers of rock and dirt were ceaselessly moving, albeit at paces that were usually too slow for most sentient creatures to perceive.  _ This _ earthquake was very noticeable, not just to the aquatic deity but to all of the Deep Ones, which immediately fled their city as soon as the cracks began to grow. Carried on the underwater currents Dagon heard them cry for help, asking him why? Why?—he was their god, he should know why, and he did!—but he couldn’t answer. Surely some among them knew about the Great Old Ones, surely one knew about the importance of the positions of the stars, and surely one knew about the sleeping priest in the corpse-city that shared space in the Pacific Ocean with all the other “unimaginable horrors”. Surely that someone would explain that Topside was about to sink, and as for the ocean floor?

Yeah. 

...Yeah, a large chunk of it rose. It rose with an ear-splitting noise, a rumble that the water just barely muffled, and the black, rotting ocean floor was touched by sunlight for the first time in nearly forever. Not a pleasant experience, that. Dagon slipped back into the ocean as quickly as he could. Maybe the Deep Ones could handle it, but he himself did not like the warm daylit air, and he much preferred the soothing comfort that the cool saltwater offered.

…So. Cthulhu was waking up. Couldn’t it have happened at a better time? When it wouldn’t disturb Dagon’s day of rest? Hell, he had to go and be a deity every other day, and all that cuttlefish-faced telepath did was  _ sleep _ and  _ mess with human dreams _ all the time! Dagon never got to rest that long! He couldn’t even recall the last time he’d slept!

Far on the other edge of the minutes-old continent, the corpse-city was also experiencing daylight for the first time in a long time. Silently, Dagon hoped that the very first thing that happened was that Cthulhu would clamber out of his slimy tomb and get blinded. Wouldn’t that be nice. 

About a week passed, and Dagon spent the entire time waiting for the moment that the major human cities would fall to “unimaginable horrors” and the rest of the Great Old Ones would rouse from a death-sleep to reclaim power over this long-conquered planet. It never happened. 

With rising bitterness, he realized that something had gone wrong with the ritual. The stars were back in position, and were about to  _ leave _ that position, so where were the screams, the scorching of existence as humans know it, the plague of chaos and madness? That era wasn’t coming, which meant that his life had been temporarily interrupted for nothing. 

But time was anything but monotonous, and apparently, false-alarms for the coming apocalypse were just a way for the unconscious universe to keep its deities on edge. 

While that week passed, he realized that some important artefacts were missing. The Deep Ones had relocated to an undisturbed section of the Pacific Ocean, closer to the mainland, and most of them had been able to take their belongings with them, as well as idols to continue devoutly worshipping the giant Fish-Gods, both Dagon and his consort, Mother Hydra. But they couldn’t take the pearlescent monument with them—something expertly crafted thousands of years ago, something that glowed down in his abyssopelagic home where sunlight did not reach, something that he could use to center his own power and listen to prayers of his worshippers—that, they could not take. It had gone up to the surface the day of the earthquake, and Dagon wanted to retrieve it. It was a precious, powerful work of art, and it would be a shame to lose something so dear to him and the Deep Ones.

So, during the night when that burning star wasn’t visible, and the moon was bright as it hung high in the sky, the ancient amphibious being swam to that new continent of black rocks and rotting fish—they couldn’t escape the sudden shift and must have died after the sudden misplacement—and followed the soft call of the monolith. The shape of the land was ugly and noxious, and it was a shame that its rolling hills and diverse life had died and become sore for his eyes. It  _ hurt _ to see it like this, actually.

Those Great Old Ones, along with their plans, were sometimes _quite_ _irritating_. 

Don’t get him wrong, he respects them. He, as well as the lady Hydra, even agreed to protect Cthylla on Cthulhu’s behalf. And maybe he was partly excited to see the land civilizations fall. But why, pray tell, couldn’t this particular aberrant event either _actually_ _lead_ to something, or come at a better time?? Why did R’lyeh’s ascent to the surface have to drag along a perfectly innocent Deep One settlement with it?

As he swam within some remaining inky waters in the shadowed canyon, Dagon finally spotted the monolith with its intricate bas-reliefs, a carved history of his people and some myths of the aquatic pantheon. The blurry image of it seemed to wobble from his view underwater, until Dagon rose, dripping cold water, into the still night air. His gills spluttered and burned before they shut, and he opened his mouth to hack out water and use lungs that had not been used in quite a while. Dagon was fast both in and out of water, which was good because he cared little for staying out any longer than he had to, and quickly crossed the space between the water’s edge and the pristine monolith.

The black banks of the jagged canyon were still damp, and slippery, but he managed to hold his balance until he reached the monolith, and, having reached his destination, wrapped his strong arms around it to tug it from its base and drag it back into the water to be relocated. He strained with the effort, bowing his head and muttering curses, most of them about how inconvenient all this was. Damn those Outer Gods.

That moment, a peculiar sound struck his ears, and he turned his head to fix his eyes on the source of it. 

A—

A man? A human man?

_ How _ ??

The human stared at him with wide eyes, a horrified scream erupting from his mouth, much louder than one might expect such tiny lungs to conjure forth. He backed away slowly at first as the scream died down into heaving breaths and a hitched sob or two, before he turned and fled, climbing up the steep cliff as quickly as he could.

Dagon watched this happen, a mixture of bewilderment, pity, and frustration churning in his mind. _ Oh, come on _ , he wanted to complain, but did not know any human languages.  _ I can’t be that maddening of a sight. You didn’t see me losing it when I first became aware that the primitive apes on the land had started building tools, then farms, then civilizations!  _

But this man had indeed lost his mind, and now he wobbled at the top of the cliff, and began to sing a panicked, unintelligible song. He broke himself off and threw back his head, laughing, before he wandered out of sight. For the next few minutes the sound of his bouts of hysteria, intermittently sprinkled with alien music, floated over in the humid night air, before it faded with distance. That, or the man had passed out. Dagon didn’t know, and he didn’t particularly care.

It wasn’t his job to worry about humans mysteriously turning up in random places where they logically shouldn’t be— _ seriously, how did he get here _ —and then going insane at the sight of a deity hitherto unfamiliar to them. Dagon grunted and pulled the stone monolith out of its stone fixture, and then dragged it back to the water’s edge before disappearing under the silent, void-dark waves. 

Altogether, this past week had been stressful, and it ended in the same manner as the brief geographic insanity had begun. Storm clouds gathered and darkened the sky, lightning danced across invisible paths and the Pacific Ocean’s waves grew choppier than normal. The earth began to rumble, and the black continent sank back to its usual spot, smothering a few fish who were caught unaware under the dislocated chunk of seabed. Most of the architecture that belonged to the immortal underwater race was ruined, having buckled under the pressure of rising so quickly—and if not that, then the shaking of the dirt caused them to fall over onto each other, or else crack under the strain. 

At least this whole ordeal was over. Life returned to semi-normalcy, but Dagon never did find out when, how, or why that random human had appeared in the far-flung center of the Pacific.


End file.
